Philadelphia jury awards $78 million to Abington man who said Roundup weed killer gave him cancer

A Philadelphia jury delivered a $78 million verdict Thursday against agricultural giant Monsanto, finding that the company’s weed killer, Roundup, was a reason an Abington man developed blood cancer.

William Melissen, 51, used Roundup frequently for nearly three decades starting in 1992. He was diagnosed in 2020 with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which he argued in legal filings was the result of his exposure to chemicals in the product. He and his wife, Margaret, sued Monsanto and its German parent company Bayer in 2021 in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas.

The lawsuit is one of thousands of cases nationally, and dozens in Philadelphia, in which people who developed cancer accuse Monsanto of negligence and for failing to include adequate warnings about its weed killer product.

Philadelphia juries have returned verdicts for and against Monsanto in previous trials.

Last month, a jury found that while Roundup was defective it did not cause the cancer of an Erie County man. The verdict was Monsanto’s second win in Philadelphia. But in January a local jury awarded a Lycoming County man with a similar claim $2.25 billion. (A Philadelphia judge reduced the award to roughly $400 million in June.)

Previously, Philadelphia juries awarded $175 million and $3.5 million to plaintiffs who claimed Roundup caused their cancer.

Lawyers for each side framed the case differently to the jury.

Tom Kline of Kline and Specter, who represented Melissen, described a company that allegedly manipulated evidence and concealed information about the potential dangers of its product for half a century.

“When a company fails to tell the truth about their products, and people get sick and die, the company needs to be held accountable,” he told the jury in his opening statement on the first day of the trial mid-September.

Monsanto’s lawyer, Bart Williams, a Los Angeles-based partner at the Proskauer Rose firm, told the jury that the trial wasn’t about the company’s history but whether Roundup was a cause in Melissen’s cancer specifically.

“This case is not a class action,” Williams reiterated in his closing remarks.

The attorney presented to the jury transcripts from testimony by Melissen and his treating physician that showed that the Abington man’s cancer is in remission, and that he was treated in one five-day round of chemotherapy.

Kline told the jury in his closing argument that they have the ability to reach the CEO and boardroom of an international multibillion dollar corporation by awarding punitive damages, which are meant to punish the company for its conduct. He asked the jurors to return a verdict in “Monsanto dollars.”

The jurors reached a verdict after less than three hours of deliberations Thursday afternoon, concluding the nearly monthlong trial.

The jury awarded Melissen $3 million dollars in compensatory damages and $75 million in punitive damages.

“This is one more jury that recognized the outrages conduct of Monsanto for 50 years,” Kline told The Inquirer after the verdict reading.

Williams, who litigated the case on behalf of Monsanto, declined to comment.

Monsanto said in a statement that it disagrees with the jury’s verdict, and that evidence doesn’t support the claim that Roundup causes cancer. It also said that the trial had errors that provide the company strong grounds for appeal.

Among the alleged errors in the case was that the case wasn’t dismissed following an August decision by three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, who ruled that Pennsylvania state law cannot require a more expansive pesticide warning label than the one approved by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Monsanto used that ruling to ask a state appeals court to halt the Melissen trial before it started, but the request was denied last month.